First off, my sincere apologies for the delay in writing this week — work has taken me offline and out of town for much of the last week. The good news is that there is some cool new content in the pipeline, including a video tour of the Belmont PD that I hope to post in the coming days, for those of you who missed the BPD tour earlier in the year.
In the meantime, I wanted to weigh in on what I think is an important issue — and one that directly effects BloggingBelmont’s audience, namely: the Board of Selectmen’s new policy on responding to e-mail inquiries from voters. If you didn’t read it in the Citizen Herald, here’s the scoop: the Selectmen have decided that they will no longer respond directly to email correspondents and have cited the State’s open meeting laws as a reason. The open meeting laws are a complex beast, and I don’t want to bore you with it here, so I’ve broken out a discussion about them and you can read it here.
The long and short of this issue is that Belmont’s Selectman are using a very expansive interpretation of the open meeting laws to bolster their decision to stop e-mail communications. According to Selectmen Firenze, e-mail exchanges with constituents in town may inadvertently violate the law because they can be circulated freely. If communications contain information about a Selectman’s position on an issue before the board, and if they fall under the gaze of a fellow Selectman, they could constitute an illegal quorum of the Board in which deliberations on the public matter were taking place outside of the public’s eye. They believe this is true, even if the e-mail was read inadvertently, or posted in a public forum, as with the e-mail message from Dan LeClerc that I posted to B2 back in February.
According the BCH article, “Because there are only three members of the board, two of them make a quorum, and it is illegal for a quorum of a governmental body to discuss matters of policy outside of a meeting open to the public. Once a selectman responds to an e-mail from a constituent, the content of that e-mail is out of their hands, and has the potential to reach another board member.”
What’s the solution? In short, e-mail communication between voters and Selectmen is now going to be a one-way street. Under the new policy “Instead of responding individually to constituents, the board will forward all the e-mails they receive about matters of town policy to the Board of Selectmen’s Office, where an automated message will respond with an explanation of the board’s e-mail policy.”
After that, it gets complicated. “Town Administrator Tom Younger and Assistant Town Administrator Jeff Conti will draft the response message before the board votes it into policy. It will explain that the board does not respond to individual e-mails, but that the communication has been received. It will then be included in the packet circulated to each member before a meeting, and will be entered as part of the public record.”
These machinations would all be understandable if the mandate were coming as the result of a voter lawsuit, from the State or even from the Town’s legal counsel. But it isn’t. In fact, this new policy was cooked up by the Selectmen without direct input from the town’s legal advisers. It’s a confusing situation but let me sum it up this way, based on a phone conversation with Selectman Firenze shortly after the article was published:
1) There is some hazy language in the open meetings laws, which are certainly not clear on the status of e-mail conversations, given that e-mail didn’t exist outside of classified government labs when the laws were passed in the mid 1970s. Think of it this way: nobody — but nobody — is suggesting that one elected official inadvertently reading the thoughts of another elected official in an email thread or as its posted on a Web site constitutes an illegal quorum under the open meetings law — but it doesn’t NOT say that either. The Selectmen have not asked for the legal opinion of the Town’s counsel on this because, in short, that would cost the town money.
2) The Selectmen have been using personal computers to conduct official business for the town, including sending and receiving e-mail from their personal e-mail accounts. This does seem to be an area of concern. Selectmen Firenze cites a Massachusetts Municipal Association position paper that personal computers should not be used for official business. We haven’t seen that position paper (we’re asking for it), but that sounds like a reasonable prohibition.
3) The town has offered to buy the Selectmen laptops to work and email on so they can stop using their personal computers, but Mr. Firenze and Mr. Soloman were not interested because that would cost the town money, and because they don’t relish having to drag them back and forth to Town Hall with them.
4) The current email setup, in which messages sent to the Selectmen’s e-mail address gets copied to all three Selectmen is sub optimal. First of all, it’s not working because there’s no way to coordinate who responds to those emails and what gets said, and second of all because the Selectmen get a lot of email and it takes time to respond to them. Finally, the current setup doesn’t work because email is easy to pass along and because its often hard to discern tone or intent from written email messages.
So that’s the reasoning. My take on this? I think that, in matters of public policy, Hippocrates ancient maxim “first, do no harm” should apply. And, in this case, I think that harm is being done. First of all, there’s a significant amount of discussion within Belmont that happens online, whether its in Yahoo groups or person to person. It’s 2008, so I don’t need to get analytic about how critical email communications are. It’s just a fact. Second, there’s a significant population of residents, especially those who work outside of town, who use e-mail and the Internet as a primary means of staying in touch with town affairs and getting their voice heard. To these people, the Selectmen are saying “you can talk, but we can’t discuss.” Other residents who choose to write letters, phone call or go to in person meetings get a different standard of service, and that’s not fair.
Finally, I just think its kind of nutty that three paid employees of the town are, in essence, saying that they want to be excepted from using a standard tool of modern organizations: the personal computer. I think it’s entirely reasonable for the town to purchase laptops for the Selectmen to use in the course of business, and to help them keep their private and public roles separate. The Selectmen need to meet the town half way and agree to use the laptops. The Rube Goldberg machine of an email response policy sounds complicated and Tom Younger and Jeff Conti have better things to do with their days than forwarding emails around and assembling printouts for the Selectmen’s meeting. Frankly, complaining about having to lug the devices to and fro, or the burden of keeping separate systems will ring hollow to the countless white collar professionals in town who do this every day and who wouldn’t dream of telling their employer “no thanks” when presented with a company standard laptop or desktop to do their job.
My 2c. You can register your displeasure (or your support) for the new policy by emailing them at: selectmen@town.belmont.ma.us.